I have to thank Kent for direct­ing me this summer to the work of Kristin Dyk­stra, an accom­plished trans­la­tor and scholar of Cuban poetry who has been gain­ing some notice as an expert on the work of Reina Maria Rodriguez, among sev­eral others. I rec­om­mend with plea­sure a Jacket 35 fea­ture from last year that she edited on the Cuban poet Omar Perez (with an inter­view by Kent).

Perez is quite a good poet, and hap­pily sits in a nexus where he will gain atten­tion from among crit­ics of a cul­tural and his­tor­i­cal bent for the inter­est­ing polit­i­cal and social reg­is­ters at work in his mul­ti­lin­gual poetry, as well as those con­cerned with the­o­ret­i­cal impli­ca­tions of style because of the intri­cate craft involved in its com­po­si­tion. Part of this appeal (I must note) is that Dykstra’s trans­la­tions are reg­u­larly excel­lent and often pitch-​perfect.

Here is one exem­plary poem from the man­u­script Lingua Franca:

Every­thing turns to water

You’re right, son: eleven and I love you sound sim­i­lar
— por­ten­tous lan­guage —
well, every word encloses
a teach­ing and a trap.
I become dec­i­mals, omelet thou­sand verbs
coffee three cents at the water­front.
“Coño, acere, every­thing turns to water!”
The dis­con­ti­nous dialect of the deities,
common tongue of fruit salads,
a world in placid erec­tion
whose female part is
rel­a­tiv­ity,
trans­forms in name: every­thing turns to liquid,
guitar accom­pa­ni­ment and the one
too slow to act
loses the liquid of the language.

Mul­ti­lin­gual poetry—especially that uses mul­ti­ple lan­guages in a famil­iar or inti­mate reg­is­ter, as in the voice of a bilin­gual speaker—often hangs its hat on the moment of delight in encoun­ter­ing acci­dents of lan­guage. This poem is rumi­na­tion on that very moment. Perez sug­gests in his open­ing lines and elaborations—correctly, in my view—that moments of poetry spring out of dis­con­ti­nu­ities in lan­guage. Poems them­selves must be crafted, but always follow the fault lines in lan­guage as it unfolds through experience.

There’s a sim­i­lar chance ele­ment ported into a series of poems in the new Jacket 38 for which Perez made his first sortie into Eng­lish (as a result, he says, of his rich col­lab­o­ra­tions and con­ver­sa­tions with Dyk­stra and Johnson):

It’s with the mind

It’s with the mind that i con­verse
end­less rev­o­lu­tion of the jaw
wild-​horsepower of the brain
chew­ing eter­nity in a word:
my mind mine
no rhyme.

The last clause is the com­pressed point of the poem. We see the push toward the extremes of allit­er­a­tion (“my mind mine”) and the too-​obvious final “rhyme” that con­dense the syntax that was (before the colon) orderly so as to model fore­stall­ment of the com­mu­ni­ca­bil­ity of mes­sage. “My mind mine” echoes the first poem’s ending, “loses the liquid of the language”—both are overde­ter­mined by allit­er­a­tion in com­par­i­son to the sub­tlety of asso­nance in prior lines, but are nonethe­less deeply felt and per­fect poetic puntos by virtue of their sound against the poem’s gen­eral tone.

In these moments of repet­i­tive sound and com­pressed syntax, Perez is offer­ing a wink­ing acknowl­edg­ment of how poetry jumps out of con­ver­sa­tion, how metaphors and rhymes are a fact of all lan­guage and not a mere fact of poetry. The poet mobi­lizes them to prac­tice you notic­ing them. Perez’s poet­ics is to push you toward your own speech, gen­eral talk, notic­ing how lan­guage func­tions at every and any moment, espe­cially in moments of inti­macy between two people.

This small­ness and inten­sity marked by Perez’s lovely lyri­cal turns means that the political-​cultural con­cerns of mul­ti­lin­gual­ism here do not aim at broad reflec­tion alone, or do so only in the rear-​view mirror. Famil­iar inti­macy only backs into a broader project (dare I say “dis­course”?). It’s there to think about, but the evoked moment is there to feel.

There are cer­tainly echoes of West­ern (and non-​Western) tra­di­tions in the “Every­thing turns to water”’s evo­ca­tion of lin­guis­tic origin: “the dis­con­tin­u­ous dialect of the deities” is one myth; global floods are another; the trans-​oceanic found­ing of Rome by Aeneas yet another; & cetera. But we don’t expe­ri­ence vast tapes­tries of his­tory when we use our lan­guage or some­one else’s: we encounter sim­pler mea­sures of sim­i­lar­ity and dif­fer­ence. “Eter­nity” can’t be chewed; a “word” can.

And as Perez’s poem hints at, water has a phys­i­cal pres­ence that our exis­tence depends on, and that we expe­ri­ence dif­fer­ently at the level of daily life too, just like lan­guage. We can step out­side of our lan­guage in a moment of poetic reflec­tion, but even that is made of lan­guage. Water, language—the sub­stances sine quibus non—; and are these the only two?

EDITED: to cor­rect edi­to­r­ial respon­si­bil­i­ties of Jacket 35.